Finding my inner artist through hand stitching

Cuff Bracelets

To get my new studio’s stitching nights off to a great start, I decided to create a few small projects to share with my fellow stitchers. First up were my lavender sachets, then we made Alabama Chanin flowers from Alabama Stitch Book, and last month I decided to try something a little different. I had been practicing the techniques is Natalie’s latest book, The Geometry of Hand Sewing, and I thought it might be fun to use some of my stripe stenciled scraps to make cuff bracelets.

The grids in Natalie’s book make it so easy to make perfect sized stitches

Soon I had several different cuffs to use as examples. I even made one example really simple with just a running stitch for my friend who swears she can not sew.

The cuff in the middle is just three running stitches and a quick cut out – easy!

I got so enamored with the idea, I decided to go big. I fell in love with Natalie’s idea of building up stitches to create elaborate combinations and the example on page 87 of her Geometry of Hand-Sewing book really spoke to me so I decided to give it a try.

I decided for a cuff, I would want the stitches all in gray, so what to do with this sample? Why, make a reading glasses case from it. We were all just joking during my last stitch night that I should have lots of magnifiers around to help with needling our thread.

I just stitched a backing on this “cuff” to make it a glasses case.

Here’s what my activity looked like at my studio night. I tried to give them lots of options with different color backings and beads. I also had several strips sewn out and couching ropes.

With a little help from me and The Geometry of Hand Sewing, all of my friends made really cute cuffs – including my friend who can’t sew

Even though it is the end of summer I really wanted to make myself a white cuff with some scraps I had, so I came up with this:

Intense close up – sorry – still getting used to this new iPhone camera

And here are a few of the details:

First I sewed on two 3/4″ stripes using cretan stitch in white thread on top of two layers of white organic cotton jersey cut 7″ x 2″, then I added silver sequins in the spaces between the stitches using french knots to hold the sequins on

Then came time to decide on a fastener. I had tried using just cotton rope knots on some of my other cuffs but they kept slipping off so buttons it is

I sewed on a loop to catch the button

Since the cuff was already pretty sparkly I decided to go with a plain clear button